Leaked correspondence of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations shows the Palestinian Authority's readiness to hand over Jerusalem and more to Israel.
IT is an accepted fact that the Palestine issue is central to Arab psyche. The Arab street has felt impotent as Israel, with the support of the West, gobbled up Palestinian land and Arab leaders looked the other way. The Arab world was in for a rude shock when the trailblazing television network Al Jazeera released damning new evidence of the Palestinian Authority's (P.A.) willingness to hand over virtually the whole of Jerusalem, along with huge swathes of the West Bank, to Israel in return for a truncated statehood. The expose has been described as the biggest leak of confidential documents relating to the conflict in West Asia.
The chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, was quoted as telling the Israeli negotiators that his side was willing to concede the biggest Yerushalayim [the Hebrew name for Jerusalem] in Jewish history. Palestinians in particular and Arabs in general were shocked by the fact that during the peace negotiations the Palestinian side secretly agreed to accept all but one of the illegal Israeli settlements in Jerusalem. More controversially, the Palestinian side offered to set up with Israel a joint committee that would administer the Haram al Sharif in Jerusalem, one of the holiest sites for Muslims.
The Palestine Papers released on the Al Jazeera network in the third week of January further inflamed the Arab street. The documents, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, are more shocking than the ones released recently by WikiLeaks. They show that during the high-level talks in 2008 held between P.A. representatives, Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Tzipi Livni and senior United States officials, the Palestinian side came up with a map of a Palestinian state with significant compromises. The Israeli side, backed by the Americans, refused to accept the deal despite the historic concessions that were on offer. The offer highlighted the P.A.'s desperation and also belied Israel's repeated claims that it did not have a peace partner to negotiate with.
The documents show that senior Palestinian negotiators offered significant concessions on the right of return for millions of refugees forced out of their homes by the Israeli occupation. The documents also show that there was a great deal of collaboration between the P.A., Israel and the United States, especially in the efforts to combat Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip. The Palestine Papers reveal that the P.A. leadership knew about Israel's plan to launch an all-out war against the people of Gaza in 2008-2009. More than 1,400 Palestinians died in the attack. The Fatah leadership was obsessed with crushing its political rival Hamas, which had won the elections of 2006. The P.A. seemed to care little for the fate of 1.5 million people, their compatriots, suffering for three years in the barricaded Gaza Strip.
The 1,600-odd documents Al Jazeera has procured are based on diplomatic correspondence detailing the negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians from 1999 to 2010. The documents include memos, maps, minutes from private meetings, accounts of high-level exchanges and strategy papers. Al Jazeera has, of course, not revealed the source of the leak. According to Arab commentators, in all probability the source was Palestinian.
In the transcripts, there are several occasions when Palestinian negotiators actually ask their Israeli counterparts to further tighten the blockade on the Gaza Strip. The Papers also show that the P.A., along with the U.S. and Israel, successfully pressed for the postponement of a vote on the Goldstone Report on Israeli war crimes in Gaza in the United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHRC). The P.A. took the position following U.S. assurances that Israel would give concessions during the peace talks. A UNHRC endorsement would have taken Israeli leaders responsible for Operation Cast Lead one step closer to the U.N. war crimes tribunal. President Mahmoud Abbas said at the time that he had asked for the postponement to win more international support for the Goldstone Report. The P.A. initially tried to sow doubts about the veracity of the documents but later claimed that the positions it took were only part of a negotiating strategy. But the Israeli side seemed to have got the green signal to accelerate the construction in the Arab-majority East Jerusalem, secure in the knowledge that the P.A. leadership was desperate for a two-state solution at any cost.
At the Camp David talks in 2000, presided over by U.S. President Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat refused to give up on the sacrosanct Palestinian right of return and would not concede Israel's demand to cede Jerusalem. Clinton had described Arafat's principled action as a blunder. Arafat's successors in the P.A. evidently seem to share the same view and are prepared to cross the red lines that are sacred to the Palestinian cause.
The Palestine Papers reveal that the P.A. was willing to scale down the number of refugees allowed the right of return to a paltry 10,000. There are more than four million Palestinian refugees, most of them stateless. Besides, the P.A. negotiators were even willing to take in Arab citizens of Israel. To bolster its credentials of being a Jewish state, Israeli politicians have talked about expelling the sizable Arab population (which numbers 1.3 million today) that chose to continue living in its ancestral land.
According to the Palestine Papers, P.A. negotiators accepted Israel's demand to be recognised as a Jewish state. Erekat told Livni in 2007 that he had no objections, but in public he struck a different posture. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered a settlement freeze in October 2010 in exchange for recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, Erekat chose to characterise the demand as racist. Erekat is also quoted in the documents as describing Ariel Sharon, the butcher of Beirut, as a friend.
Refusing refugees the right of return runs counter to U.N. Security Council resolutions and international law. The Security Council has declared all settlements built on occupied land after 1967 illegal.
Palestinian officials clarified after the release of the Palestine Papers that what had been mentioned were only negotiating stances and were subject to the principle that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. But the disaffected Palestinian public has reasons to seethe that a government whose term had legally ended in 2009 could offer Israel such far-reaching concessions. The documents also reveal that there was a lot of talk between Israeli and P.A. negotiators on extrajudicial killings of Palestinian resistance fighters from Hamas and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which is aligned to the ruling Fatah in the West Bank. British intelligence services, the documents show, played a key role in the preparation of a military blueprint for the P.A. to crush Hamas in the Palestinian territories. Erekat, according to the documents, is quoted as telling David Hale, a senior Obama administration official, that the P.A. had to kill Palestinians to establish one authority, one gun and rule of law. The P.A.'s security force is trained by the Americans. The Palestine Papers also reveal a high level of intimacy between the Israeli and Palestinian security services. One out of every 80 Palestinians in the West Bank has been absorbed in the Palestinian security force.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, according to the Palestine Papers, had warned that the Obama administration would react strongly if President Abbas, who has ruled by decree since 2008, was replaced. Abbas had threatened to resign on several occasions after his mandate ended in 2009. In December, he once again threatened to resign and dissolve the P.A. I cannot remain President of an Authority that does not exist, he said. But the Americans and the Israelis are willing to do business only with him. A statement from Hamas after the release of the Palestine Papers said that the men of Fatah who created the Palestinian Authority represent nothing but a betrayal of the interests of the Palestinian people.
With the release of the Papers, the peace process may not survive much longer. Whatever little faith Palestinians had in the P.A. disappeared when its leadership signalled its intention to surrender every core right guaranteed to Palestinians by the international community. Without a peace process, the rationale for the continued existence of the P.A. will disappear. The P.A. is now focussed on getting a U.N. resolution passed against the illegal Israeli settlements.
It has received a boost of sorts as more and more countries across the world have started recognising the State of Palestine. However, the fact of the matter is that Palestine will remain an occupied state as Israel, supported by the U.S. and most other Western countries, carries on relentlessly in its efforts to reduce Palestine into a Bantustan.
